Re: ARM BE8 linker support

[Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at arm dot com>]

On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 00:46, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 07:23:57PM +0100, Paul Brook wrote:
> > On Thursday 01 April 2004 12:32, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> > > Paul,
> > >
> > > I've just realized that there are a couple of omissions from this patch
> > > (there's no need to back it out, but I think they would be best addressed
> > > while the patch is fresh in your mind):
> > >
> > > BE8 mode should really only be possible for EABI v3 or later images.
> > 
> > Ok. Does this include the GNU EABI? ie. should it be extended to include BE8?
> > 
> > > It ought to be possible to create a configuration where BE8 mode is the
> > > default (assuming a big-endian object file)...
> > 
> > Does this mean making a new pseudo-target, eg. armbe8-elf, in the same way we 
> > have armeb-elf which defaults to be32 objects?
> > 
> > If this were gcc I'd probably suggest something equivalent to -mabi=, and the 
> > associated --with-abi= configure switch. There doesn't seem to be the same 
> > precedent for this in binutils/ld though.
> 
> Do we need to make gas default to this, or would it be enough to make
> GCC have a mode where it passes the right arguments to gas by default? 
> That's what most other targets seem to do.

I think it needs to be possible to make GAS default to this in some
circumstances.  Otherwise it will do the wrong thing if you invoke the
assembler directly and don't put an option on the command line.

What I'm not sure yet is whether this should be done by having a new
configuration target (eg. arm-elf-eabi) or as a configure option.  See
my earlier mail on this thread for my feelings about the configure
option.

R.